1. Deep respect, often for another person. The Latin reverentia suggests religious awe, even shyness. It’s at the core of – it may in truth be the entirety of – the religious feeling. In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto describes “the deeply felt religious experience” he names “creature-consciousness” or “creature-feeling,” which is “the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.” For Otto, this creature-feeling arises directly in the shadow cast by this “supreme” element, which is the experience of the numinous, his coinage for the super-saturated apperception of the spiritual power (“daemonic dread”) and holy awe that loom over the world. This awe spills out especially from the feeling of “createdness” this experience, this knowledge inspires. It’s holiness he’s defining, of course, but whose core is reverence – deep, even humbling respect.
2. Reverence is one of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. According to Catholic teaching, these Seven Gifts – Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Counsel, Fortitude, Reverence, and Fear of the Lord – are received in the sacrament of Confirmation. (Reverence is often replaced with the term Piety. Reverence was Aquinas’s preferred term for the gift.) In the United States, individual parishes are permitted to determine when to perform the sacrament of Confirmation. For most, this happens in early adolescence, when you’re thirteen or fourteen. When one of my sons was confirmed several years ago, he attended a Confirmation vigil with my brother, whom he asked to be his sponsor. One of the rituals of the vigil involved the Seven Gifts. Confirmandees were asked to choose which of the gifts they wanted most to identify with by approaching a sign reading the name of the gift, seven of which had been placed around the altar. My son, at the urging of my brother, chose Reverence. Of one hundred teenagers, he was the only one to do so. (Most chose Fortitude; I think the sign even read “Strength.”) When I asked my brother afterwards what prompted the choice, he said he convinced my son that there’s too much irreverence in the world, to choose reverence as a way to make a correction.
3. There is poetry I approach – especially the poetry of the Black Mountain lineage – with unguarded reverence. I can understand it as a scholar, more broadly as a reader of modern poetry, but as a poet, I genuflect before this poetry.
4. A few years ago, my parish received a new pastor. (Most assignments in the Archdiocese are temporary.) A little older than I am, from the same place in fact (he grew up on the west side of Detroit, I on the east side), we shared a lot in common. I grew to like him a great deal. When he started, he ruffled feathers in the congregation by instituting changes to the liturgy that struck many as conservative. (It’s a progressive parish.) More candles, more ornate crucifixes, replacement of the glass chalices with gold-plated chalices (more appropriate as vessels for the Precious Blood of Our Lord, as he wrote in the weekly bulletin). He asked the altar servers to wear surplices with cords around the waist and not to wear sneakers. On Sundays, he himself would wear a cassock when we wasn’t in vestments for Mass. (And be honest: If you could get away with wearing a cassock, wouldn’t you wear one every day?) Everyone assumed he was conservative, culturally and politically. Of course, he wasn’t. He was simply reverent. Something few had much experience with. It appeared to them, amazingly, like disrespect.
5. There are poets I revere to whose works, manifesting the disciplines of labor and technique, I give reverence. That’s what I do when I read them, when I share the passions for them.
6. I have no quarrel with irreverence. One of the greatest poetic techniques of the twentieth century – free association – actively courts irreverence as a way of chiseling at the block of ice that encases the imagination. Surrealism’s and Dada’s proliferations and experiments make manifest irreverence’s liberating bravura. As a poet, you want to be opening things up, and irreverence functions like a lockpick. If some irreverence oozes with smarm or simply vulgarizes, other forms of irreverence are sincere, complex, and strange. (I’m thinking of Whitman’s “I cock my hat indoors or out as I please.”)
7. Irreverence is easy. Reverence is hard. Can it also be misguided? Patriotism, jingoism, unquestioned fealty: It can.
8. "Attitude of supplication: I must necessarily turn to something other than myself since it is a question of being delivered from self."
"Any attempt to gain deliverance by means of my own energy would be like the efforts of a cow which pulls at its hobble and so falls onto its knees."
"In making it one liberates a certain amount of energy in oneself by a violence which serves to degrade more energy. Compensation as in thermodynamics; a vicious circle from which one can be delivered only from on high."
"The source of man’s moral energy lies outside him, as does that of his physical energy (food, respiration). He generally finds it, and that is why he has the illusion – as on the physical plane – that his being carries the principle to its preservation within itself. Privation alone makes him feel his need. And, in the event of privation, he cannot help turning to anything whatever which is edible.
There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light."
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
9. What happens when there’s nothing to revere? Nothing to supplicate to, nothing to be delivered from? Despair. The faculty of feeding on darkness.
10. When I revere a poet or that poet’s work, there’s a quality of supplication in the act. Does the deep respect of one require the same of the other? I revere the work of Ezra Pound. The ideogrammic method he discovered defines my sense of what the art can do. Even as I hold the work in awe, I don’t revere the man. Will the deeds of the man eventually fade, leaving the work to endure? If so, will the aura of the work expand in such a way to inform how we feel about the poet? Is it Sappho we revere or an image of Sappho projected from the work?
11. “What if we need a new technology for glory?” Ed Roberson
12. Pius – related to the noun pietas – is the adjective most often used to qualify Aeneas. He uses the word when introducing himself to his mother, Venus, disguising herself as Diana, announcing, “I am devout Aeneas, known in heaven.” (Aeneas 1.378, in Sarah Ruden’s translation.) Classicist W.R. Johnson points out that the word “pious” doesn’t capture the meaning of the Latin word, nor suggest enough of its range of connotations, “which center on the purity of an individual’s devotion to the performance of the obligations he has to members of his family, to his fellow citizens, and to the gods of his tribe.” Numen is one of Virgil’s favorite words – for him, it stands for divine power. Aeneas’s devotion is numinous, a complex feeling of pity and piety (these words both comes from pius) into which converges identity itself, pious Aeneas, known in heaven.
13. A longstanding fascination with Byzantine Christianity has shaped my creative urges. In 1998, I visited the Duomo of Monreale in the hills above Palermo, an extraordinary cathedral commissioned by the Norman skeptocrator William II in 1174, whose walls and dome are decorated with vast and intricate glass mosaics, with scenes from the Old and New Testaments on the walls of the nave, and with the apse decorated by tiers of prophets and saints arrayed under a commanding dome showing Christ Pantocrator, who gazes out into the nave with a look of serene dread.
In 2004, I visited Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, consecrated in 1117, modeled after the Hagia Sophia, on whose domes shimmer radiant images in glass mosaic of scenes from the gospels, depictions of saints, an immense and geometric hive of gold, seemingly gathered and stored there from creation itself. In a poem, “Awe,” written sometime after and published in 2010, I tried to capture the feeling of coming into these churches. It begins:
14. Itaque regnum inmobile suscipientes habemus gratiam, per quam serviamus placentes Deo cum metu et reverentia. (Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.) Hebrews 12:28.
15. I love comedy, comedians. The best humor is irreverent. Must all humor be irreverent to be funny? Jokes are funny. Dirty jokes are funniest.
16. A friend relating once a family story apostrophizes, “My aunts, whom I revered...”
17. As a boy, I held my parents in complex awe, a vibrant and often troubling mixture of fear, love, and need. In the classic sense, I honored my mother and father, something that has persisted into my adulthood. Now my parents are old. Love, care, tedium. No fear. Not much need. Reverence? I’m not sure that word captures it.
18. In graduate school, I took classes with Peter Homans, a scholar of the psychology of religion, an expert on Freud and Jung. He was older, soft spoken, robust in his way, and unusually thoughtful. It would take him several seconds – a long pause – to respond to something, a question or a thought. He smiled readily and expressed his doubts about the difficulty of a topic without qualm. I adored him.
Many in my cohort didn’t. He was a curious person and not always obvious in his approaches. A consequential dream early in my time in graduate school in which Peter featured prominently – in the dream he related to me that he terminated his psychoanalysis with Freud after only two sessions when he had the realization that “the body is all” – committed me to his instruction.
One of the greatest learning experiences of my life was a course Peter taught to me and three other students called “The Study of Lives,” in which we discussed the psychological forces of biography. We met every week in his office in Swift Hall – where the Divinity School of the University of Chicago is housed – leaded glass windows rising into the ribs of the building’s stone. All of Jung, all of Freud, thousands of books lining the walls. Our primary text was Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. Peter chose this text because the previous summer, he and his wife visited Florence for their vacation. He related to us that they would spend the mornings apart, reading, meet for lunch and then spend the afternoons visiting museums and other sites. During the mornings, he read Darwin. “It was one of the greatest reading experiences of my life.” That’s why we were reading this book, to explore that experience.
Allow me to apostrophize, “Peter Homans, whom I revered...”
19. The Old English word for reverence is arweorþnes. The verb, arweorþian, means to honor, to revere, to worship. You can see/hear the word worth in its ancestor. Weorþ is a noun meaning worth, value, price, and an adjective meaning worthy, honored, noble. Two closely related verbs echo the noun: weorþian, which means to esteem, to honor, to exalt, to praise; and weorþan, which means to become, as in to arise, to take your place, by association to be worthy. Ar- in arweorþnes is an intensifier, taking worth and intensifying it to reverence. On its own, it can stand for a messenger, apostle, even an angel, by extension standing for honor, grace, glory, and reverence, with obvious ecclesiastical connotations. Arweorþnes – intensified, reverent worth.
20. Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.
21. There was a tree in my neighborhood I revered. A plane tree of some sort, not a sycamore but related, that grew almost at a forty-five-degree angle, with a broad trunk of substantial girth tapering into a diagonal crown of leaves, its gnarled branches twisting in relation to its unusual angle of growth. It must have been seventy-five years old. Nimbly, with some speed, you could have climbed it by running up the slope of its trunk. (I never tried.) It seemed ancient and strange to me, an archaic holy thing, growing on the lot in front of the library. I deliberately walked a path to the train so I could see it, pay it homage. Last year, they cut it down planting there an upright sapling in its place.
22. Birds I revere: blue jays, especially in flocks with echoing jeers, bellicose red-winged blackbirds “exhibiting aggressive behavior,” woodpeckers, especially red-bellied woodpeckers mating in their neatly carpentered holes and red-headed woodpeckers like outrageous heralds of the heavenly realm; anytime I see an owl, from the suspicious and vigilant burrowing owls down in Florida to the great horned owl pestered by crows in a pine tree to the apocalyptic cruise missile of the barred owl quieting through the swamp of bald cypresses to the snowy owl at the winter solstice along the lakeshore in the gloam of early evening like a sentient gathering of white and blue light tilting silently then stroking towards the Moon.
Birds of prey, especially the kestrels and the Cooper’s hawks snatching sparrows from the suburban yards.
And in the spring migration, all the splendid passerines done up in spectacular sexual colors – from the scarlet tanagers in tuxedos of hallucinatory saffron to the great crested flycatchers dusted with yellow to all the warblers, one after the other, and this year especially these three: the golden-winged warbler with his slight insistent buzzy song and his cerulean suit, the mourning warbler’s yellow cloak tinged in radiant olive skulking along the river’s floodpath, and the black-throated blue warbler’s epiphanic flash from the bushes alongside the railroad tracks.
23. OLD FRIEND ON THE QUIET SIDE OF FAR AWAY
This morning orioles seemed to spark
from every tree: “Spots before my eyes”
after restless sleep.
And then the mountains west
blinding with late June snow.
How is that sumo live oak outside
your corner window?
How are those marvelous blond hills
rolling down to the sea?
Merrill Gilfillan
24. Reverence is a feeling. It arises ritually; it’s connected to ceremonial behavior, like attending a religious gathering or visiting a gravesite. It also arises spontaneously in such a way that its feeling intensifies. This happens for me in the presence of natural forms – seeing Mount Rainier on a clear day, hearing Lake Superior detonate its waves on the limestone cliffs of Pictured Rocks, looking at night into the abyss of stars from Craters of the Moon.
Or fireflies. Fireflies at dusk on the solstice, flaring in beguiling aperiodic plumes over the grasses.
25. Dante’s reverence for Virgil. You are my master and my author. Only Blake’s relationship to Milton is more reverently emphatic, more complex because corrective. In 1958, Robert Duncan created a questionnaire for a workshop in basic techniques he taught, to be answered by the participants on the first day. One of the questions states, “‘Thou art my master and my author,’ Dante says to Virgil. What poet could you name as Dante names Virgil?” In response, Jack Spicer wrote, “None. I’m not as ignorant of my masters as Dante was of Vergil.”
26. In The H.D. Book, Duncan writes, “Dante’s sense of his own place is the foundation of the Dream, the locus of its Truth. ‘Thou art my master and my author,’ he addresses Virgil – it is the Permission of the poet Dante in the man Dante. The glory is to be universal, not personal. The poet must not – it is the commandment of vision – usurp authority in his office. This is what Blake in turn means when he tells us ‘the authors are in eternity.’ Dante’s master and author, Blake’s authors, are counterparts of Thoth and the New Master, not only over Love but over the Poem, in H.D.’s Trilogy. These things, the poet testifies, I did not see by my own virtues, but there were revealed to me.”
Reverence as an outcome of revelation.
27. Dante proclaims Tu se’ lo mio maestro e’l mio autore in the first canto of the Inferno when he recognizes Virgil – “Now, art thou that Virgilius and that fountain / which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech?” (In Longfellow’s translation.) Master and author. Putting yourself in the position to proclaim such a thing directly. Who honestly feels that way about another poet, living or dead? I suspect Spicer’s feeling is much more common.
28. "The deeper the level at which one encounters you, Master, the more one realizes the universality of your influence. This is the criterion by which I can judge at each moment how far I have progressed with you. When all the things around me, while preserving their own individual contours, their own special savours, nevertheless appear to me as animated by a single secret spirit and therefore as diffused and intermingled within a single element, infinitely close, infinitely remote; and when, locked within the jealous intimacy of a divine sanctuary, I yet feel myself to be wandering at large in the empyrean of all created beings: then I shall know that I am approaching that central point where the heart of the world is caught in the descending radiance of the heart of God."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Mass on the World”
29. Do you revere inanimate things? A few. The Great Lakes – but are they really inanimate? Aren’t they living bodies with animations of waveforms, circulations of temperatures, surges of ice, swathes of fog – not to mention all the life in the waters themselves? I admire certain mechanisms – the gearwork in a pencil sharpener, the ferrule on a new pencil – and I’m fascinated with certain designs – like those of the Vienna Workshops – but that’s not reverence. In the empyrean of all created beings: the fire signs of animation, transanimating energies. In these we recognize life, things alive. Isn’t reverence what stokes these little flames to watchfires, like sentience itself.
30. I was born on February 3. February 2 is the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, one of the most ancient feasts on the Church calendar. (Christ was not baptized until he was thirty or so – in the scene that begins the Gospel of Mark – by John the Baptist in the River Jordan.) All the candles a Catholic parish will use during a given year are purchased ideally before February 2, so they might be blessed at the Feast when Christ, the Light of the World, is presented to the public for the first time. This blessing anticipates a smaller feast on my birthday, the Feast of Saint Blaise, an Armenian physician who lived during the third and fourth centuries and who is patron saint of maladies of the throat. (Having arrived in Sebastia, the city of his birth in Armenia, and having been arrested by the governor who was intent on killing all the Christians in his jurisdiction, Saint Blaise was approached by a woman whose son was choking to death on a fish bone lodged in his throat. The child was immediately cured.) Some of the candles that are purchased are used – unlighted – to bless people’s throats.
Not long after I was born, I developed an esophageal web that made breathing difficult. I was hospitalized and kept under an oxygen tent. Since adolescence, various woes have concentrated in my throat – swallowing agonies, problems with asthma, recurring soreness. Is the connection to Saint Blaise a coincidence? I revere the saints. One way I know my reverence: a lump in the throat.
31. What’s it like not to revere? We live in an irreverent age; most of us have faint contact with reverence such that we might not recognize it when we feel it. Though not one of the vehement passions, it’s a virtue. To experience reverence is to be improved and to cultivate it is virtuous, a form of strength.
Your first real experience of reverence was probably with a teacher – an adult in a position to instruct you. Maybe as a child, maybe as an adolescent. A fundamentally asymmetrical relationship; what flows to you from the person you revere is substantially greater than what flows from you to that person. Nevertheless, the relationship is sustained – and is sustaining – because something is going from one person to the other. What is that something? Care.
32. Noli me tangere. When Mary Magdalene clings to the newly resurrected Christ, and when he says these words to her, according to one interpretive tradition, he means “Not yet” as much as he means “Don’t touch me.” (He is about to ascend to heaven.) Mary’s pre-emptive clinging: Isn’t it possible that this is a gesture of reverence, as much, perhaps, as one of sorrow, desperation, and love?
In the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, expanded to over 450 pages from the ninety-five page edition of the 1855 edition, Whitman ends with a poem called “So long!”, which begins: “To conclude—I announce what comes after me, / The thought must be promulged, that all I know at any time suffices for that time only—not subsequent time; / I announce greater offspring, orators, days, and then depart.” Towards the end of this rousing poem, Whitman professes, “This is no book, / Who touches this, touches a man.” These lines are famous, get quoted a lot. (In later versions, Whitman added, “Camarado, this is no book…,” a goofy touch.) What rarely gets quoted when these lines are invoked are those that follow, tremoring with erotic contact: “(Is it night? Are we here alone?), / It is I you hold, and who holds you, / I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.”
Decease calls me forth. Whitman’s is a statement of intimate care. And isn’t also Christ’s? Not yet, because decease calls me forth. No book will this be, but a man.
33. I’m writing this during the coronavirus pandemic. The obligation to heed the advice of public health officials is being widely ignored. A second wave has arrived already in early July and it’s monster-sized, growing from a combination of ignorance and opportunity. There’s some other form than irreverence to describe reverence’s inversion, something more vicious and nasty, behaving like reverence but taking on wicked forms and creating the worst-conceivable outcomes. What is it? Blind obedience? Opportunistic stupidity? Self-loathing?
34. At bottom, the reverence you feel for another person and even perhaps for living forms arises from an experience of help. In some capacity, that person or thing has helped you, uplifted you, improved you, indebted you to the better person you’ve become. Perhaps by encouragement or care, perhaps by showing you your actual place in a living world. Irreverence, especially in humor, is not the opposite of this feeling and recognition. Rather, it’s simply auxiliary to it, a form of reverence that has undergone transformation, but originating from it. The actual opposite of reverence is carelessness.
35. In the acknowledgments to his book Darling, Richard Rodriguez writes, “I dedicate this book to my earliest teachers, young Irish women, members of the order of the Sisters of Mercy, who traversed an ocean and a continent to teach me. It was their lives and example remembered that has led me to the conclusion that the future of the Abrahamic religions will be determined by women, not men.” Amen. From what does Rodriguez draw this conclusion? From all the care the Sisters of Mercy showed him. From reverence.
36. Haecceitas appears out of black brickwork like evidence shallowly buried for a
hundred years. Dark remnants glim hallowly; there is a spontaneous
combustion in the vast bastion of waste.
The Church of St Francis Xavier, where Gerard was rebuked for overwrought
pulpit behaviour, I believe I could revere merely for his being (briefly) there.
Reconstructed to Dublin, poisoned iron drinking-fountain, finally even he began
to complain.
Geoffrey Hill, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, poem 214
37. Haecceity is something’s “thisness.” Hopkins (who is the Gerard in Hill’s poem) fondled this concept – which comes from Duns Scotus – in his mind like you might rub to smoothness a stone you keep in your pocket. When he encountered the term in his studies of Scotus, which began in 1872, it aligned with the notions of inscape and instress he had already been developing. The Church of St Francis Xavier was the Jesuit church in Liverpool where Hopkins served as priest from 1879-81. Hopkins was ordained on September 23, 1877, when he was thirty-three years old. St Francis Xavier was already his fifth assignment as a priest. In his various assignments, he often failed to find success as a preacher, “misjudging... idioms and subjects congenial to his congregation’s tastes and spirit.” Overwrought pulpit behavior, as Hill commemorates it. In 1884, Hopkins was assigned to teach classics at University College, Dublin. Ireland disagreed with him – he found it gloomy and unfriendly, and all the while he was there, a prevailing sense of desolation deepened until he died there of typhoid in 1889, only forty-four years old. Reverence comes easily in a church. Hill’s reverence for St Francis Xavier is focused on the pulpit from which Hopkins with overwrought behavior for a brief period preached. Reverence as permanent residue transience like water on an oily slick beads away from.
But just so, Hopkins doted on what he might see from his window, describing things in his journal in spellbinding detail, such as, “A lunar halo,” from February 23, 1872, “I looked at it from the upstairs library window. It was a grave grained sky, the strands rising a little from left to right. The halo was not quite round, for in the first place it was a little pulled and drawn below, by the refraction of the lower air perhaps, but what is more it fell in on the nether left-hand side to rhyme the moon itself, which was not quite at full. I could not but strongly feel in my fancy the odd instress of this, the moon leaning on her side, as if fallen back, in the cheerful light floor within the ring, after with magical rightness and success tracing round her the ring the steady copy of her own outline.”
39. Surely living evokes
a majestic spirit
Illumined
the soul is an exquisite organ
Receptive
imagination does not require power
Sown in bones and flesh
Raised in flaming mysticalness
Your vision will alight
the fire to create
a continual source
of sustenance
Pam Rehm, from “One to Another”
40. A care-worn reverence.
41. Like other forms of piety, reverence takes time to be activated, to be useful. It’s not that it doesn’t matter to the young, that it doesn’t appeal to youthfulness; rather, it’s simply hard. Spending time with someone or something can awaken your reverence. It allows all the noise that might otherwise distract your care to quiet enough for you to notice how you feel. In “The Prelude,” Wordsworth wrote:
The thirst of living praise.
A reverence for the glorious dead, the sight
Of those long vistas, catacombs in which
Perennial minds lie visibly entombed,
Have often stirred the heart of youth, and bred
A fervent love of vigorous discipline.
Alas, such high commotion touched not me;
No look was in these walls to put to shame
My easy spirits, and discountenance
Their light composure – for less to instil
A calm resolve of mind, firmly addressed
To puissant efforts. Not was this the blame
Of others, but my own... (Book III, lines 339-51)
A Franciscan friend of mine once said, “Catholicism is hard for the young – it doesn’t make a lot of sense.” He’s right. You could replace Catholicism with reverence and the claim would hold equally.
42. I don’t know what’s going to happen in this life or in the one to come. I don’t know whether this republic will dissolve or survive. I don’t know what the fate of human life on this planet will be in the alarming light of the climate crisis. I don’t know to what extent poetry has anything worthwhile to contribute to these agonizing uncertainties. But I do know that without reverence, all of these things, later if not sooner, will almost certainly fail. Reverence – the outward and inward sign of care – is required. Now, and urgently.
43. My teenage son began playing the violin over a decade ago. He’s very good. He was enticed by a music teacher who came to visit his pre-school class. He’s been working with this same teacher ever since. As a teenager, his attitude towards adults, his teachers, his peers, is entirely consonant with that of his peer group. Did you see the film, “The Eighth Grade”? He inhabits the same moral universe as Kayla, the film’s protagonist, desiring to please his friends, mortified by the adults around him, defiant and snarky towards the world. With one exception: his violin teacher. Her he reveres. He genuinely seeks her approval, he works to improve himself because of her. That he has an adult that he looks up to who is not a part of the family is one of the best things, in my mind, in his life.
44. Does everything depend on this feeling of reverence? Everything holy surely does. A decent, civil society does. Spotting and calling out false forms of piety – patriotic paeans, hymns to gun-wielding, fatuous appeals to national greatness – does.
45. Parting the Lilac
spy creation of galaxies
or total new species
across spectrums of chance
the very grist at dance
parting the lilac, act
aleap aleap aleap the fact
stars slowest swirl to us
eye whatever God there is
silent, silent the deep
enough to see me to sleep
-Ronald Johnson
46. Poetry? We practice an obscure art few truly care about but that seizes hold of you entirely, bending the whole work of your life in its direction. Many are the things poetry gives me – and I try not to ask much of it: pleasure, hours in absorption, companions, passions to share, books, a focus to my discipline. And it gives me something worthwhile to revere. First, I revered Ronald Johnson’s work and then not long after, I began to revere the poet himself. And now I revere his memory. And from all that reverence has come everything.